The Peak Design Travel Tripod's intuitive Ball Head is great and all, but what about panoramic pictures? Is there any way to lock ball head only for horizontal movement?

While the Compact Ball Head on our tripod does not have an independent panning function (in order to save space and streamline the interface), we've designed a Universal Head Adaptor that allows you to use any standard 3rd party tripod head with your PD tripod and thereby integrate the panning functionality.

How about Video, Fluid Heads?

Good news. Our Universal Head Adapter also allows you to use a Fluid Head for video.

However, this adapter does not have a leveling feature, so you would need to determine level through the leveling bubble on your fluid head or some cameras have an electronic leveling feature you can use. In order to level the head on uneven terrain, you would need to adjust the tripod legs. 

To be clear, our compact and lightweight legs are sized for the needs of the travel photo community. Putting a large video head on any photo travel tripod (rather than a studio tripod) may result in undesired vibration or overtravel during pans and tilts.

Interestingly, the unique leg shape of our travel tripod gives excellent yaw torque resistance for our packed volume and weight.

So if you're a user who needs fluid panning, tilting for video or other aforementioned functionalities, you can read our quick overview below, watch Art Director Lawrence Lander demonstrate the installation and usage, or view the instructional card included in the package.

In a nutshell, the Universal Head Adapter attaches to the Travel Tripod's center column via a hex-drive screw.  

Simply:

1. Put Compact Ball Head (which comes standard with the Travel Tripod) into portrait mode to reveal the fastening screw. Insert the the 4mm end of the hex wrench included with the Universal Head Adaptor (or the one that came with your Travel Tripod which has a little more leverage) and loosen until you can separate the ball head from the center column.

2. Attach the Universal Head Adapter with 4mm hex wrench. The red arrow below indicates where the fastening screw can be found. 

3. Then attach your 3rd party tripod head. 

4. Use the included 2.5mm hex wrench to raise the stabilizing screws to firmly fix 3rd party head. These help to stabilize the head helps prevent it from unscrewing using friction between the screws and the underside of your head. 

These are the stabilizing screws in their "tightened" position:

You tighten them by inserting the 2.5mm hex wrench here (shown in the picture below)